This article is adapted from an episode of our podcast, “Civic.” Click the audio player below to hear the full story.
Federal funding cuts to medical research and new rules for grants are dismantling projects at the University of California, San Francisco, and the San Francisco Veterans Administration Medical Center, two of the nation’s leading research hubs. And the U.S. government shutdown is expected to deepen the disruption, halting new grants from the National Institutes of Health and reviews by the National Science Foundation, and raising fears of lasting damage to California’s role in scientific discovery.
An executive order targeting what the White House calls “radical and wasteful” diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives has blocked certifications for universities seeking federal grants. Agencies review proposals for terms like “diversity,” “equity,” “barrier,” “inclusion,” “women,” “gender,” “trauma” or “underrepresented,” treating them as red flags. Under new grant-screening protocols, grants may be delayed, rewritten, or terminated if an agency deems the language or programs inconsistent with federal DEI restrictions.
This episode of “Civic” examines how universities, courts and Congress are scrambling to protect the future of science in the face of of drastic federal funding cuts. We also explore how veterans are responding and efforts to rescue critical programs.
Additionally, in February the NIH moved to slash the rate of reimbursement for facilities and administration costs to 15%, a cut the University of California called “catastrophic,” warning it would strip hundreds of millions of dollars from lab operations, staff and patient-care infrastructure. That rule is still under litigation, but many institutions have already frozen hiring or construction in anticipation.
Universities and medical centers that depend heavily on federal research funds, including UCSF and the San Francisco VA Medical Center, have reported project cancellations and hiring freezes, while early-career researchers are questioning whether to stay in science at all.
Dr. Monica Gandhi, a nationally recognized HIV researcher and professor of medicine at UCSF, which receives $80 million dollars for HIV research alone, said grant terminations began to ripple across labs in March as the CDC informed researchers that the government rejected certain projects as incongruent with “biologically based guidelines” because they included the word “regender.”
“It’s crazy on a public health agency funded by the government to say the government rejects these,” Gandhi said. “Everyone was scrambling to put in new grants without the words; you’re suddenly changing your whole research platform.”
More than 100 grants to UCSF projects were canceled in the months after the order was issued; some were later reinstated amid litigation, others not. The cumulative effect, said Gandhi, has been to chill science and to push early-stage investigators toward purely clinical careers.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that a permanent 10% reduction in NIH funding and a nine-month increase in U.S. Food and Drug Administration review times of new drug applications means 30 fewer drugs coming to market over the next three decades.
Creating dialogue, not debate
Some young scientists are working on a plan to reverse the anti-science trend they’ve seen take hold of the country.
Erin Morrow, a PhD student in cognitive neuroscience at UCLA, is participating in the McClintock Letters, a grassroots campaign by graduate students and early-career researchers urging colleagues to write hometown op-eds that translate bench science into everyday stakes.
Morrow said her support of the campaign is personal — not merely as a scientist but as a beneficiary of research. As an undergraduate, Morrow was diagnosed with a cardiac electrical disorder. At age 21, she received a pacemaker — a pulse-regulating device based on an accidental discovery resulting from scientific research in the late 1950s.
“I realized that pacemaker and the research that supported it wouldn’t exist without decades of U.S. investment,” she said. “I’m a living reminder — walking around with a little reminder in my chest — of how important federal funding is.”
Sneha Rao, UCSF PhD student in development biology, said the aim of the McClintock Letters is not to hector audiences but to practice two-way plain-language conversation across differences. She’s had to navigate difficult conversations about her research with her own family, which showed her how valuable it is to explain her work clearly and convey why it matters — and now more than ever “in an age when politics and polarization seems to be creating more and more barriers, as opposed to bringing them down,” Rao said.
“A really positive aspect of the past maybe few years is the idea that community engagement is not one sided,” she said. “Not ‘I’m coming to you to tell you about something, and you’re going to listen to me.’ It’s much more of a two-way dialogue.”
Cuts hit the VA
The Northern California Institute for Research and Education is a San Francisco-based nonprofit that manages grants and hires staff so VA clinicians and UCSF collaborators can focus on science. Its CEO, Rebecca Rosales, said the organization is feeling squeezed.
Rosales said new federal awards this fiscal year are down roughly a third from last year and annual increments on existing five-year projects are delayed months past expected renewal dates. Every new notice of award, she said, now demands a “fine-tooth comb” to catch sensitive keywords or newly inserted terms and conditions.
“This is a very stressful time,” Rosales said.
What sustains her is walking the VA campus and seeing veterans and their families.
“I recognize the value in both the clinical and research work that’s being done here on campus, and what it translates to,” Rosales said. “It’s not data, it’s a real person that I saw eating lunch in the cafeteria, and the possibility of making an impact on them long term.”
Since the 1920s, the VA has pioneered advances from artificial limbs to PTSD therapies, from the first successful liver transplant to contributions that helped bring the CT scan and the cardiac pacemaker into being.
VA studies have unparalleled value since they can draw from a single national system with patient data spanning generations. That enables projects like the Million Veteran Program — a genetic biobank with DNA from over 1 million service members. Scientists use it to study everything from cancer risk to post-traumatic stress. Without renewed federal support, the database could go dark.
“Private hospitals don’t do this kind of research at scale,” says Suzanne Gordon, a journalist and policy analyst with the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute.
When veterans are steered to private providers, she said, they’re removed from the coordinated VA pipeline that identifies eligible patients, enrolls them in studies and follows them for years.
“A private-sector oncologist, they’re not going to enroll them in a VA research study that they don’t even know exists,” Gordon said. “If you’re depleting the system of patients, you’re impacting the research.”
Mel Mann said he embodies what’s at stake if research if stalls. In 1995, at 37, the Army major was diagnosed with chronic myelogenous leukemia — white blood cell cancer — and given three years to live without a bone-marrow transplant. As a Black patient at a time that registries were far smaller and less diverse, he faced poor odds. He turned to clinical trials.
For years, nothing worked. Then Mann entered an early-phase study of a then-experimental class of drugs — tyrosine kinase inhibitors — that would transform chronic myelogenous leukemia from a death sentence into a manageable condition.
“That research, back in the ’50s, was funded by the federal government,” Mann said. “Without research, I would not be here.”
Political stalemate
The Trump administration’s fiscal year 2026 budget blueprint proposed some of the deepest reductions to science spending in U.S. history. (The federal fiscal year is from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30.) The plan called for cutting funds for the NIH by about 40%, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by 44% and the National Science Foundation by nearly 60%.
Congress ultimately blocked those cuts, but the administration has been using rescissions and withholdings — clawing back already-appropriated funds through the Office of Management and Budget. Altogether, the budget maneuvers, rule changes, indirect-cost cuts and collapse of programs achieve much of what an overt 40% cut would have without ever formally passing Congress.
Both chambers of Congress have signaled resistance to the deepest cuts, with opposition coming from both sides of the political spectrum.
In July, 14 Republican senators led by Sen. Katie Britt, a Republican from Alabama, sent a letter to the White House urging release of delayed NIH funds, saying suspending appropriated funds “could threaten Americans’ ability to access better treatments and limit our nation’s leadership in biomedical science.”
Rep. Kevin Mullin, a Democrat from San Mateo whose district includes South San Francisco, which helped birth the biotech industry, warned that rescinding NIH funds would “shutter labs, lay off thousands of researchers, and bring groundbreaking research to a halt.”
Democrats lack the votes to block Republican priorities outright, so they’re wielding hearings, lawsuits, resolutions and public pressure to force compromises in spending negotiations.
On Sept. 30, the government shut down after Congress failed to agree on a spending bill, with negotiations collapsing over deeply partisan divisions on federal budget cuts, including to science and medical research. The shutdown freezes new grant disbursements and research proposal reviews, causing delays, uncertainty and potential gaps in ongoing projects.
California might try to cushion the federal government’s blows to research. State Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat, has authored SB 829 to create a California Institute for Scientific Research within the Government Operations Agency, empowered to award grants and offer loans to universities and private firms.
All proposals would be reviewed via open, competitive peer review and selected by a governing council guided by scientific merit and state research priorities. The institute would be funded through annual budget allocations decided by the Legislature, not via a fixed revenue stream or dedicated tax.
If lawmakers advance it, voters will decide the institute’s fate through a 2026 ballot measure.